#BlogTour ‘The Patient’ by Jane Shemilt

About the book…

She is his doctor. He will be her downfall.

The bestselling phenomenon returns…

When Rachel meets Luc, the attraction is instant.
But she is a doctor, and he is her patient.
She gives him the drugs he needs – but in doing so, risks everything.
And when a secret is exposed, they’re both in the firing line.
Not all patients are telling the truth.

My thanks for having me on the blogtour to Anne Cater, blogtour organiser extraordinaire, and publishers Harper Collins for my gifted e-arc of ‘The Patient’ by Jane Shemilt which is out now from all good bookshops!

This novel is a beautifully layered character study in the way that men and women are treated in their middle ages.

Rachel has everything on the surface-beautiful home, husband, daughter, a profession where she is respected-and yet, when you dig a little deeper, you see that this is a woman stretched thin to the point of transparency.

Her relationship with Nathan, her husband, is going to shatter, it feels like it is the finest crystal balanced on the most precarious shelf edge. She is menopausal, and therefore their sex life has stalled-obviously all her fault, eye socket shattering eye roll from this pre-menopausal woman over here.

Her colleagues regard her male GP more highly than her, and find him more patient-despite the fact that she is constantly overrunning her appointments, as a woman she is seen to be more eminently sympathetic in her role. And when she does try and stick to the appointment time limits? A recent death of a patient who she ran out time to really reach, a resultant suicide has left her shaken.

Her house is her husband’s domain, she has no say in the colours there, her office is where she really comes alive and even here, she feels she is still not reaching the heights expected of her. This is not a woman on the edge, she is already fading into insubstantial mist. Not sexual, not maternal, not efficient…just not enough.

So when a patient arrives, after hours, and she takes his case to free up her heavily pregnant colleague, Luc’s case is the catalyst to a slow burn novel of psychological unravelling and suspense.

Having established that she has nothing to lose at this point, the sense of menace twists and coils around these characters. And I am not sure as I haven’t been to Salisbury, but everything around the geographical area which is described brilliantly, makes it feel like a character in and of itself. It relates, to me, in the respect of the Salisbury Poisonings, and , in a sense, Rachel’s life, her supposedly successful life, is slowly poisoning her, with the expectations on her as a wife, a mother, a professional. It takes someone, her patient, who shouldn’t really have been her patient, to flip that script and unleash a series of events that ricochet from England to France.

A masterful and gripping novel about the expectations on women to exist and behave in a way that society demands of them, I could not put this one down!

About the author…

Jane is a general practitioner who completed a post graduate diploma in Creative Writing at Bristol university and went on to study for a M.A in Creative writing at Bath Spa. She was shortlisted for the Janklow and Nesbitt award and the Lucy Cavendish fiction prize for ‘Daughter’, her first novel.

She and her husband, a Professor of Neurosurgery, have 5 children and live in Bristol, England.

Twitter @Janeshemilt @RandomTTours @fictionpubteam